7. Staffing guides

Navigation: ‘Scheduling tab, then ‘Staffing Guides’

Goal: To set up sales metric averages for each department that you can use to help make better decisions regarding shift coverage when creating your scheduling.

Staffing Guides Overview

We import a variety of sales metrics from your POS in the Ameego's syncing process. Though some POS types differ a little, the typical metrics would include net and gross sales, meal sales, meal counts, liquor sales, liquor counts, restaurant sales, bar sales, restaurant guests, check counts and more. After we import these metrics into Ameego, they are time stamped in 15 minute intervals. Ameego's 3 week average or annual trend forecasting methods will create a multi-layered forecast of all of these metrics.

The Staffing Guides section will allow you to choose one of these metrics for a department and input the number of employees required when you reach certain sales points. Then, Ameego's scheduling process will run a forecast and import your base floor plans. Based on this and your staffing guide, we will display how many shifts you have scheduled compared to how many you should have in each 15 minute increment of your business hours. This will allow you to make any required adjustments to the shifts before assigning them to your employees. More on that to come in our Scheduling Guide!

Note: Setting up your staffing guides setup can be a daunting task when you are first learning how to use Ameego. They’re used for an advanced level of analytics in the scheduling process. If you are more comfortable skipping this step for now, you can revisit this area after you have been using Ameego for a few weeks. But don't forget to revisit, the use of these staffing guides one of Ameego's claim to fame!

Setting up a staffing guide

The steps below will guide you through setting up a department with a specific metric and then setting the sales points for that metric. It is important to know that the sale points will be based on 15 minute periods and not hourly. 

Our example will focus on the Server department and we will choose the 'Restaurant Guests' metric. We feel that one server can handle up to 14 restaurant guests in a 15 minute period. Therefore we would need a second server when we get to 15 restaurant guests, a third when we get to 30, a fourth when we get to 45 and so on. Follow the steps below to setup this example.

1. Click on the ‘Schedule tab’, then click the ‘Staffing Guides’ sub tab. 
2. Click on the first department you would like to setup. Our example is the Server department.
3. Click the ‘Change Sales Metric’ button on the top right to choose a metric. We will choose ‘Restaurant Guests’ for our Server department.
4. Click on '+ Add sales point' to add the sales point required to have 1 server on the floor. 
   • Enter the 1 and click 'Add'.
5. Click on '+ Add sales point' again to add the sales point required to have 2 servers on the floor.
   • Enter 15 and click 'Add'. 
6. Keep adding sales points until you reach the maximum number of servers required at any time. 

Here is an example of how we entered our sales points for our ‘Server’ department as described above.

Managing Staffing Guides

Here are some other details to help you in regards to editing and revising your staffing guides. 

Edit a sales point - Click on the dot of the sales point to open the edit box. Highlight the existing number and enter your new number. Click ‘Save’.

Add a sales point - When you click on ‘Add Sales Point’ this will add a sales point to the next number of staff needed. In our example, our last sales point entered was for the 7th server, so the new sales point will be for the 8th server. Enter the number of guests we need to have in the restaurant to require an 8th server. Click ‘Save’. 

Remove a sales point - Click on the dot of the sales point to open the edit box. Click ‘remove this sales point’.

Change a sales metric for a department - Click on the department name and then click the 'Change sales metric' button. Choose the new metric. If you had sales points set for this department before changing the metric, be sure to review each one and edit where required. 

And lastly, we would like to suggest that you do not need to create a staffing guide for all departments. Some departments (jobs) do not relate directly to the time that the sales occur (like prep or production). Focus on the departments where the requirements directly relate to the sales and have multiple shifts throughout the day. Simply put, the departments where you’re spending most of your labour dollars! 

Here are some suggestions of some ideal sales metrics to use for the following departments. 

• • Server - Restaurant guests, restaurant sales, total guests, net or gross sales
  • Bartender - Liquor sales, liquor count, bar guests, bar sales
  • Host/Hostess - New guests
  • Cook - Meal sales, meals count

Great job team!